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JM Cozzoli

A horror genre fan with a blog. Scary.

Face Your Fear: Nightmare Ghost Stories
In New York City

/ Haunt Attractions / Leave a Comment

Ghoststories “You’re kidding,” said Mr. Chin, shaking his head in astonishment.

“No. Really. He screams like a young girl going through a bad frat initiation,” I said.

“Wow, I never imagined…”

“Now what?” There was a commotion in back of us. We were standing in line, waiting to get into The Maze, a new addition to Psycho Clan’s Nightmare: Ghost Stories, New York City’s favorite haunted house attraction.

“Hey, looks like Lawn decked the ghost,” said Mr. Chin, chuckling.

A guy wearing a white sheet had been keeping things lively by sneaking up on people waiting in line to give them a quick fright. He was now on the floor, balled-up in a fetal position and moaning horribly, although this time I don’t think he was acting. Lawn Gisland, former movie cowboy and rodeo star, had slugged him hard.

“Lordy, sorry, so sorry, buddy,” said Lawn, leaning over the prostrate ghost. You oughtn’t have snuck up on me like that. It was pure instinct is all.” The ghost moaned louder, tightly clutching his white sheet as he rocked back and forth. Two guys wearing wireless headsets came running over and carried him away. They gave Lawn dirty looks.

Going through the new Nightmare: Ghost Stories haunted attraction, Face Your Fear, can be quite a test for your nerves, as Mr. Chin, Lawn, myself and Zombos soon found out. 

Mr. Chin insisted on doing The Maze first, but the many screams emanating from it didn’t endear me to that idea. Groping around in the dark without Riddick’s eyesight, through claustrophobic, tortuous passages filled with disoriented people desperately searching for the exit, and spookers hiding around every corner waiting to scare you is–oddly–not much fun for me.

I let the eager Mr. Chin go first, then pushed Zombos ahead of me. He scowled, but I’m only his valet, not his bloody bodyguard. Lawn followed Zombos. I took a deep breadth and plunged into the pitch blackness of terror. Within the first two minutes I realized my strategy of always following the right-side wall, and always turning right at corners, wasn’t working well.

“Mr. Chin?” I called out.

“Over here,” he said.

I groped in the direction of his voice. “Where’s Zombos and Lawn?”

Someone ahead of us screamed like a young girl during a fraternity hazing.

“Hey, you weren’t kidding,” said Mr. Chin. “Let’s not go that way.” We turned left instead, right into a dead end.

There were many dead ends, and spookers patiently crouching in them, eagerly taking advantage of our poor sense of direction. Jean-Paul Sartre must have been referring to his experience in a maze when he wrote “hell is other people,” though he probably meant to say “hell is being stuck in a maze that is so dark you can’t see your freakin’ hand in front of your face, and having lots of screaming, frightened people stuck in there with you bumping into one another.” After what seemed like an eternity, a light flashed in front of us.

“Look,” said Mr. Chin. Ahead of us, a brawny, long-haired guy quietly pointed to the exit. Dressed in a bloody apron, and bearing a remarkable resemblance to Leatherface, we were reluctant to take him up on his offer. He was pretty insistent, however, so I pushed Mr. Chin ahead of me and we ran past him. Freedom never tasted so good. We braced ourselves for the main attraction, Face Your Fear.

Lawn and Zombos were already waiting on the line to get in, under the flickering chandelier covered in cobwebs. Lawn was smiling from ear to ear, and Zombos looked as white as the sheet that poor ghost had worn. They were reading the Assumption of Risk disclaimer tacked to the wall. A really really large poster with very very small print.

“I reckon that ‘physical injury from frightening performers, or from sudden reactions to them may occur’ blurb is a might true,” said Lawn with a laugh. Zombos stood mute, but his fists were clenched into tight balls. “Maybe I should go first,” said Lawn, taking pity on Zombos.

Of course, any experienced haunt attraction devotee knows you never go in second, or last for that matter. There’s safety in numbers, especially the middle odd ones when in a group of determined, but skittish horrorheads.

Once the doors opened, and we were inside, the true fear that comes from the expected unexpected began. Haunted attractions rely on simple but devilish effects that take advantage of darkness or gloomy light, unnerving and disorienting sounds, and spookers, both visible and dressed in blackout clothes, primed and ready to lead you into and out of each foreboding room of fright, with all designed to scare the hell out of you, and maybe gross you out a bit along the way for added measure.

Suddenly, a pair of headlights caught Zombos in their beams, and a car crashed just a foot or so away from him. He was too startled to scream this time. Like I said, the second person always gets it but good. From there it was a feverish, twitchy-tour, from freak-me-out room to you-go-first room, each filled with a mind-numbing tableau of terror. At one point we had to climb over a bed to get to a door on the other side. Mr. Chin took the initiative after I–and even Lawn–balked at ruffling the bedsheets for fear of what lay underneath.

Then there were strobe lights. Really disorienting strobe lights, flashing out time-slices in that bizarre, mixed-up, non-linear way of theirs. In the room of mummies, we found ourselves desperately trying to avoid their touch as they changed position to the beat of the strobing light, blocking our exit. Or did they even move? Perhaps the alternating darkness and brightness made it seem they were moving. The tableau reminded me of the blind nurses’ devilish mannequin dance in Silent Hill. I wanted out from this temporal aliasing so bad I could taste it.

I finally managed to get past the blinking mummies…and into the twirling laser-light tunnel, spinning around and around and around, taking what little wits I had left and spinning them around, too. The coup de grâce was stepping ankle deep into something grainy and squishy, down a tenebrous hallway, just before we were set free.

“Lord love a duck, would you look at my shoes,” I said. Whatever it was we walked through was still in my shoes.

“That was the most harrowing experience of horror I’ve had,” said Zombos, clutching his heart.

“Tarnation! What a ride,” said Lawn, dusting off his boots.

“Damn, let’s do that again!” said Mr. Chin. We looked at him in horror.

Then we did it again.

    Documentary Review: Vampira The Movie (2006)

    / Documentaries, Horror Hosts / Leave a Comment

     

    Zombos Says: Good

    The year is 1954. It’s midnight on a KABC-TV Saturday night. A striking, impossibly wasp-waisted woman in a torn black dress glides down a long, dry ice misty, cobwebbed corridor toward the camera, past unlit candelabras. She stops. Suddenly she screams, then looks at the camera with a devilish gleam in her eyes and says “Screaming relaxes me so.”

    Vampira’s short-lived television show–where, in-between showing gems like White Zombie and forgettable B-fare, she would mix a foaming cocktail to “absolutely kill you,” or search for her always lost pet spider, Rollo–opened the door for the many male and female horror hosts that followed, and set the tongue-in-cheek, ghoul-cool standard for hosting still seen today. With her phallic-looking nails, plunging v-neck exposed bosom, and sardonic wit, she presented quite the picture of the succubus every straight guy would love to meet in a darkened room.

    Kevin Sean Michaels, in his documentary, Vampira: The Movie, introduces us to Maila Nurmi, Vampira’s more normal alter ego. In her eighties now, this succubus may have faded with time, but her wit remains as Nurmi talks about the creation of her influential character, still celebrated by horrorheads everywhere.

    The most striking revelation, at least for me, is that she didn’t start out the way she ended up. While many of us tend to do that, we, generally, have an inkling as to where we want to end up and aim accordingly. For Nurmi, all she wanted was to be an evangelist. How she missed that path–thank you God from us horror fans–is an interesting mix of plan and chance. Her plan was to make enough money so she could pitch a tent and start preaching. The chance came when she appeared at a costume ball, gets spotted by a producer looking for a good reason people would lose sleep for, and is hired to host a bunch of shlock horror movies that any sane person wouldn’t watch in the daytime, let alone midnight on a Saturday night.

    Using her love for comics, cartoonist Charles Addams, and bondage photographer and artist John Willie, Nurmi set about to create a “glamor ghoul.” She mixed the sensual power of Terry and the Pirates’ Dragon Lady, the ghoulish, bizarre charm of the Addams Family, and the fetishistic allure of Willie’s tightly-bound leather ladies in ecstasy (or distress) to create the first Goth chick on the television screen.

    In-between the testimonials and remembrances from notable horror personalities like Forrest J. Ackerman, Zacherley, Sid Haig, Lloyd Kaufman, Jerry Only of the Misfits, and many others, Nurmi recalls her sudden fame and subsequent Hollywood blacklisting,, and her associations with Marlon Brando and James Dean. While Vampira may have been a sexy, liberated ghoul, Nurmi shied away from acting because she disliked its competitive nature, and professed to be not as sexually-emancipated as her more seductive twin.

    Cassandra Peterson discusses the lawsuit regarding her Elvira, Mistress of the Dark character, whom Nurmi felt looked too much like Vampira, and a good portion of the documentary focuses on Vampira’s appearance in Plan 9 From Outer Space, in which Nurmi gives her initial impression of Edward D. Wood Jr. as a “low-born idiot.” Unfortunately, little remains of Vampira’s KABC-TV show, so Wood’s legendary train wreck of a movie is her most-remembered appearance. After reading the script and complaining about her dialog, she and Wood agreed to make her character in the film silent.

    The documentary is a welcome and long overdue tribute to an influential figure in the annals of cinematic horror, but it does have its minor faults. Background music is used when silence would have been golden, and too much time is spent on Plan 9 From Outer Space and Wood. The special features play more like “we’ve got to find something to add” instead of more note-worthy content, though, from the director’s commentary it appears there’s just not much material available. Nurmi led a hermit-like existence after James Dean’s death, and it is quite an accomplishment to get her talking at all. But one pines for more clips from her show, and more personal recollections from those closest to her. But hearing and seeing Maila Nurmi, even after all this time, is to die for. Thanks to her devoted fans that helped make this documentary, we don’t have to go that far.

    As Vampira would say at the close of her show, “Bad dreams, darling.”

    Resident Evil, Extinction (2007)

    / Movies (Bad) / 1 Comment

    Resident Evil Extinction poster image of Mila Jovovich with guns and mean look.Zombos Says: Fair

    I knew I had to steel myself against another blistering disappointment in horror movie entertainment. I headed to the concession stand and bought my usual reviewer-comfort food: small Cherry Coke, check; box of Junior Mints, check. I then sat in the last row, far from the screen, symbolically distancing myself from this third installment in a series that has, so far, failed to capture the eeriness and gut-wrenching involvement of the video game it sprang from. I was half-way through my box of Junior Mints, around the time when Alice–lithesome Milla Jovovich–was holding herself in her arms–her clone self, that is–that I realized kicking zombie butt can be fun to watch, even if the dialog, characters, and set-pieces are uninspired to the point of lameness. Let’s face it: the franchise keeps going only because Milla Jovovich is the prettiest and sexiest zombie butt-kicker on the screen today.

    Dressed in short-shorts, boots and garters, and two really big, sharp Kukri knives that Jim Bowie would have been proud to own, she presents quite the picture of the fashionably-dressed zombie slayer about town, or desert in this case. Unfortunately the T-Virus has spread well-beyond Racoon City, and now the entire planet is screwed big time, as well as the dwindling bunch of ragtag survivors traveling in a convoy that also would have made Mad Max proud, too.

    It all begins promisingly with the nefarious Umbrella Corporation still trying to convert the millions of zombies it helped create into domesticated companions, and trying to perfect their Alice–zombie butt-kicker extraordinaire–clone army (in case their domestication plans fail, I suppose). The original Alice is on the run, trying to avoid the Umbrella Corporation’s equally nefarious and ubiquitous spy-satellites that still run while the rest of the planet doesn’t: damn, those Duracell batteries are good.

    After a brief warm-up with a Rob Zombie-styled redneck white trash family and their dead but eager dogs, Alice comes across a notebook that points to the promised, zombie-free land of Alaska. And you thought Alaska was only good for crab and salmon, didn’t you? Of course, with 30 Days of Night soon to hit theaters, that would have made quite a tie-in, don’t you think? Zombies and vampires going at it, and Alice kicking, hacking and slashing all the way. Yummy.

    Back to reality. As Alice continues her trek across the now sandy reaches of a decimated Nevada, she hooks up with her old MySpace bunch of Racoon City survivors, whose  caravan is in desperate need of food and fuel. Here’s where the film gets mired in the usual hackneyed theatrics; that  let’s-check-out-the-“deserted hotel,” all two of us, and make sure to get bitten by a zombie while you’re distracted, so you can ignore the impending danger–no one will notice you turning green and attracting flies–and turn into a dead flesh-muncher at a really critical time to screw things up kind of usual.

    What’s not so usual is Alice’s newfound X-Men-like telekinetic ability which sure comes in handy when she remembers to use it, and, hey, what’s with those cloudy-eyed birds that have been eating nothing but zombie carrion–oh, sh*t! Run!

    Just when you think director Russell (Zen in the Art of Killing Vampires) Mulcahy and writer Paul (Castlevania) Anderson are blindly going through the zombie-shuffle, that Hitchcockian interlude with predatory zombie birds is a hair-raising thrill a minute, especially when Alice shows up to save the day.

    But things go back to status quo when Alice and the survivors pull up in a desolate Las Vegas, only to get caught unawares by dozens of ravenous zombies dressed as Mr. Goodwrench by the Umbrella Corporation. While I sat wondering how they got all those uncontrollable zombies dressed in overalls, Alice battled them and the corporation’s attempt at mind control.

    Her friends didn’t fare too well while she struggled with that one, but it does send her, very pissed, back to kick Umbrella Corp’s butt, and square off against the evil scientist who tried to capture her. He, of course, is now mutated into the usual BIG and UGLY, possibly dead, creature with evil intentions. Oh, and she runs into her clones. Lots of them. In fact, that’s the best part of the film: the ending. I hope it sets up the fourth installment. If it does, it’ll be a knockout.

    All in all, spending some time with Milla Jovovich is always enjoyable. While the make-up on the zombies is cursory,  and the action sequences needed more kick (as Gingold points out, the Las Vegas locale isn’t used well at all), this installment in the franchise is more enjoyable than the lacklustre Resident Evil: Apocalypse. So I didn’t really need to fall back on my Junior Mints and Cherry Coke much.

    Disclaimer: We apologize for this reviewer’s apparent lack of professional interest in any of the other actors, like Oded Fehr (who does a wonderful scene with a lit cigarette, a fuse, and groping zombies), in this film. While we agree that Milla Jovovich is an eyeful, it is important to recognize the talents of those supporting victims and zombies that made her look so good. Had we taken our eyes off of Jovovich, we’d be able to name them ourselves. We did notice Ashanti. She looked lovely, too.

    Graphic Book Review: Zombie Tales Vol. 1

    / Books (Graphic), Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

    Zombos Says: Very Good

    No other horror subgenre elicits more fodder for cinema than those nihilistic automatons of sheer irrational fright and disgust. Whether born of thumping voodoo drums, cosmic radiation, or the crisp tinkling of test tubes, the walking dead have brought metaphorical life to many cinematic, philosophical, theological, and fictional works. No other unreal monster instills such chills and thrills as a shambling or sprinting—and badly decomposing—undead aunt, uncle, or significant other that has eyes and teeth only for you. From social commentary to gore, zombies are the cat’s meow when it comes to biting allusive storytelling and visceral visuals combined.

    Boom! Studios’ Zombie Tales Volume One takes full advantage of this ironic oasis of socially  relevant dead people by collecting, into a nicely-sized book, stories that run the gamut of zombiedom motifs, including loss of identity, religious dilemma, and gruesome humor. It’s a rare treat to find a collection that provides stimulating horror entertainment across every story. The Walking Dead trades come to mind as one of the few that can do that. Zombie Tales Volume One accomplishes the same feat, and while each story is not above average, many are, and all are competently good.

    My favorite would have to be Daddy Smells Different. That foreboding title aside, one of the challenges in doing a short graphic story is to provide enough build-up, within the limited span of panels, to enable an effective ending; one that will leave you thinking—and feeling—a little off the well-trodden trail of typicality. Writer and artist, John Rogers and Andy Kuhn, create a 1950’s-style tale of terror with their snappy narrative, told in the first person by a little boy who goes through a more challenging change than puberty. It’s poignant, a little sad, and provides a kicker ending that leaves you uncomfortable. Both artwork and narrative work horrifyingly well together and capture a bit of that old EC Horror Comics magic.

    I, Zombie:Remains of the Day, a three-part story written by Andrew Cosby and illustrated by three capable artists in their different styles, is a sublime dip into the bizarro world of zombie humor. Another tale told in the first person narrative style, it depicts the trials and tribulations of one poor dead-head whose hunger goes deeper than just sweetmeats. Here, loss of identity becomes more replacement by a different one; one you definitely could say is a life-style change, or maybe “dead-style” would be more accurate. With a little tongue in cheek dialog, and decomposing anatomy, the story provides a happy ending only possible in your zombie imagination. One amusing scene has zombie bunnies poised for mayhem. It reminded me of a similar, albeit much more serious scene in Kim Paffenroth’s Dying to Live novel.

    Another three-part story by writer Keith Giffen, and artist Ron Lim, is a darkly-humorous, more philosophical exploration of a zombie mind slowly becoming dissolute; a once-living personality slowly dissolving into nothingness. Parallels can be drawn to the reality of alzheimer’s disease as the real horror of becoming a zombie is explored in Dead Meat: the loss of one’s self, one’s uniqueness.

    Religious dogma is the underpinning for The Miracle of Bethany, written by Michael Alan Nelson and drawn by Lee Moder. I recall one reviewer mentioning this story could be construed as blasphemous in its use of Lazarus as Zombie O, but fiction can never be blasphemous; only reality can. It’s a story that looks at how a miracle can become a curse if the spirit—and flesh—is weak. We all stand naked in the Garden of Eden after all.

    Religion also plays into Zarah’s decision-to-be-made For Pete’s Sake. Writer Johanna Stokes and artist JK Woodward explore that decision—how long do you hold out hope for the one you love in the face of despair—before you can move on with your dramatically altered life? Here, the zombie apocalypse has created a new culture of “them and us”, with people moving from building to building across foot-bridges built from roof-top to roof-top, while the ravenous, ungodly zombies walk streets below. Life goes on, as best it can. I can think of some ungodly places on earth now that closely parallel the unreal world Zarah finds herself in. What would your decision be?

    While there are other rewarding stories in this engrossing anthology, the last one will leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth as another, once happy, little boy fights to find his way back home in A Game Called Zombie. This one hearkens back to The Twilight Zone, but there is no Rod Serling here to neatly tie things up. Instead, little Travis must contend with zombies that no one else can see; worse yet, they can see him. Is he hallucinating from the onset of schizophrenia? Where did his dad go? Whatever you do, don’t open your eyes. What was chasing you is now standing in front of you.

    Comic Book Review:
    Papercutz Tales From the Crypt 2

    / Comics/Manga / Leave a Comment

    Tftc2 Zombos Says: Good

    “What the hell?” It was three a.m. in the morning. I woke up from a fitful sleep because someone was banging on my bedroom window. I threw the bedsheets aside and reluctantly got out of bed.

    “Finally! Boy, you sleep like the dead,” rasped the Crypt-Keeper as I opened the window. “Hey, watch it down there!” He was standing on the top rung of a too short ladder. Three stories below, the Old Witch and the Vault-Keeper were trying to hold the ladder steady. “Bungling dolts! And they wonder why I always get top billing.”

    “Look, if this is about that review I did for issue one—” I started saying.

    “Tsk, tsk, a bloated corpse under the bridge, Zoc, bloated corpse under the bridge. Though the boys at Papercutz were not happy. Not happy at all. Lucky for you I convinced them to put down their torches and go home.

    “Then who’s that?” I pointed to a man standing at the foot of the ladder, holding a flaming torch high in one hand and flipping me the bird with the other.

    “Oh, he’s just one of the artists. They get so temperamental, you know. Look, Zoc, baby, you’ve simply got to check out our second issue. We’ve—” The Crypt-Keeper swayed to the left, then swayed back. “Will you idiots hold the ladder steady!” he yelled. “And you with the
    torch, why don’t you put it down and help them? Don’t just stand there! I’m working here!”

    The man dropped the blazing torch and quickly grabbed hold of the ladder.

    “For hell’s sake, where was I?” asked the Crypt-Keeper.

    “You were selling me on reading issue two of Papercutz’ Tales From the Crypt.”

    “Oh, right. Look, Zoc, I’m not getting any younger. This is my last chance at a comeback. Would it kill you to just take a look?” He handed a copy of issue two to me.

    “Well, alright, but couldn’t this have waited until—say, what’s burning?”

    We looked at each other, then down below. The ladder was on fire.

    “Jimminy crickets!” yelled the Crypt-Keeper. He lost his footing and fell. Lucky for him, he fell on top of the artist, the Old Witch, and the Vault-Keeper, so that helped cushion his long fall.

    “Well then,” I mumbled as I closed the window. I sat on the edge of my bed, now wide awake, and started reading Papercutz’ Tales From the Crypt No. 2.

    Right off the bat I’ll say it’s a giant mausoleum step up from issue one. I wondered if that wonderfully ghoulish ghoul on the cover was indeed a giant—you don’t see many giant ghouls attacking apartment buildings—but no, just artistic license, though it does tie into the lead story.

    Instead of three short stories like issue one, there are two longer stories. Both offer up just deserts endings, but the first hearkens back to a 1960’s-styled social theme, while the second is a more daring take on a contemporary social reality that perplexes the sane minds among us. And there’s a frightfully funny letters page, The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner, that’s very entertaining.

    In The Tenant, writer Neil Kleid and artist Steve Mannion whip up an old-fashioned tale that has the long-gone tenants of cheapskate landlord James Winchell’s slummy property at 666 Colt Street griping for better service. And their bitching is enough to raise the dead.

    The flow of panels is good, and the witty story fits the art style of heavy black lines well. With more pages to flesh out the mood and pacing, it serves up a little taste of the original Crypt-Keeper’s sense of irony without being too morbid or gross. The encounter with one dead resident in the basement is a highlight and handled with lots of energy.

    One aspect of a comic book story often overlooked is the lettering job. Mark Lerer’s work effectively conveys the emotions and tone of James Winchell’s comeuppance along with the illustrations. Now if they could get the Crypt-Keeper’s loony introductions into his same lettering style, that would be super.

    Even the Crypt-Keeper’s puns are better this time around, and more care is taken with his zany antics. The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner letters page is hilarious, and brings back a strong element that made the original comic so enjoyable to read. In this issue, the gasps of disbelief regarding issue one, sent in by fans of the original EC Tales From the Crypt, are priceless, along with the Crypt-Keeper’s responses.

    In the second story, The Garden, writer Fred Van Lente and artist Mr. Exes combine to jolt a dumb sap who bought into the ‘deaths for paradise’ insanity, which motivates many suicide bombers, into an unexpected reality. The story has a surprising depth, and Mr. Exes’ art, a heady mix with touches of Max Fleischer kinesiology, Gil Kane, an acid trip, and manga blended madly together, jolts us as well as Richard, the guy who thought he was in paradise, when he discovers what he really got himself into. There’s a tad more gruesome in this one, too.

    Mr. Exes artistic style grated on some readers of the first issue, myself included, but I must admit that given the right kind of story his panels carry a lively charge that moves beyond conventional boundaries. Just pick up Abra Cadaver: The Afterlife Adventures of Harry Houdini No. 1 and you will see what I mean.

    “What are you reading at this ungodly hour?” asked Zombos, coming into my room.

    “Here, you will enjoy it.” I handed him the issue. He took it and sat down in the settee by the window.

    “Oh, so that’s why the Crypt-Keeper, the Old Witch, the Vault-Keeper, and some idiot trying to put out a fire on a burning ladder woke me up. I thought I was dreaming. Let’s wake up Chef Machiavelli and have him bring up a pot of hot coffee.”

    “Capital idea,” I said and rang his bedroom. It was the common lot this morning for everybody.

    Hostel (2005)

    / Movies (Gore) / Leave a Comment

    Zombos Says: Very Good

    Thank you. It’s very exciting for me to be here, especially since I know that there are some people from Slovakia who probably want to kill me for making this movie. In America, Hostel is a very terrifying horror film for many people, but I truly believe it could become one of the great comedy classics here in Eastern Europe. I’m sure you have questions, and about why I made Slovakia look like all of a sudden it’s from the 1950s, and what it might do to the tourist industry in Slovakia, and I look forward to answering all your questions and hopefully I will not get tortured to death. (Eli Roth, ‘Smash hit horror Hostel causes stir among citizens of sleepy Slovakia’)

    Whistling. I hate whistling in a horror movie. It’s such a pleasant activity, a normal activity; one that reflects a satisfied, joyful—even exuberant state of mind in the whistler. That’s why it’s so frightening and effective in the opening scene of Hostel. To hear that simple tune casually whistled by one of the “janitors” as he nonchalantly cleans the guest suites, routinely rinsing away the red splatter and body chunks down a drain, will freeze your blood. Just another day at work: just another day in hell; especially for the tourists. And you thought the plane trip was torture.This chilling contrast between the innocuous whistling and the gory evidence of disturbing activity is frightening, setting the gruesome tone for the film. Callous indifference is the theme here with people unconcerned that intense suffering and death are their job. They make money from it so it’s okay; providing human cattle to be slaughtered by bored Über-rich seeking ever more intense emotional experiences, dehumanizing themselves in their avid consumerism.

    What redeems this film from being a gratuitous exercise in explicit gore and sadistic violence is Paxton, the survivor. He starts out as another hedonistic consumer, but gains a precious sense of his soul while losing two fingers along the way. He is forced to care: he cares enough to take time while escaping to pick up his severed fingers; he also cares enough to rush back into the charnel house, after narrowly escaping the caress of a chainsaw, to save a girl he hardly knows.

    His decision sets up one of the more intense and nauseating scenes in a film filled with them. When he finds her, she is missing half of her face, and one eye dangles precariously from its now burned-out socket. That dangling eye does present a problem. Okay, what do you do? At this point I had my hands over my eyes, but through my fingers I could see the flash of scissors as Paxton decides what he must do. You know what’s coming, but Roth extends the tense moment into an excruciating eternity.

    Roth tickles our fear-bone: the fear comes from being helpless while someone can commit any form of injury on you, and fear also comes from the knowledge that the amoral townsfolk in this creepy village gladly share in this consumerism-from-hell scenario. Even the children are sadistic monsters, roaming the town and demanding tribute; willing to harm or kill for a bag of candy. Being a foreigner in Hostel is a death sentence. The chilling words spoken to Paxton by one of the rich clients sums up the moral decay best: “Be careful: you could spend all your money in there.”

    But after a film like Hostel, where do you go? How much torture and depravity can an audience take in a horror film? I’m sure Roth will try and find out.

    Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007)

    / Movies (Bad), Movies (Horror) / Leave a Comment

    Zombos Says: Fair

    Half-way into the movie I started to wonder why I wasn’t feeling the love. Where was the lingering taste of candy corn on my lips, the smell of burning pumpkin innards, charred by candle flame, in my nose? Certainly there was no suspense, or even anticipation of it, from the unstoppable bogeyman as I watched Rob Zombie’s re-imagining of John Carpenter’s 1978 retelling of The Hook urban legend, Halloween. Of course, Zombie didn’t have actors like Jamie Lee Curtis or Donald Pleasence to bolster his story, but since he spent much of the film focused on the unkempt Daeg Faerch as the young Michael Myers, perhaps that’s a moot point. Or maybe not?

    Making Myers more psychotic serial killer than ghost-like supernatural force to reckon with may be the cinematic equivalent of getting toothpaste and dental floss in your trick or treat bag instead of mouth-watering chocolates and sugary sweets. With Zombie’s penchant for dysfunctional, white-trash families, and potty-mouthed, libidinous characters you really really don’t care about, and lingering stares at his all too familiar blood-splattered tableaus, the hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-your-neck quality of the original story has been carved out and replaced with the pedestrian graphic violence prevalent in today’s horror repertoire.

    Subtlety is not one of Zombie’s stronger directorial abilities. He prefers to show everything, raw and bloody, and provide a rationale for why Michael Myers slices and dices like crazy. With a stripper for a mom, a Bowery bum for a father, a very loose unsisterly sister, and school chums that despise him with a passion, Michael will either become a born-again Christian, or a serial killer. While some may argue both cases can be the subject for a horror film, Zombie chooses the latter, and promptly drains the Jack-O-Lantern life out of the franchise.

    The adversarial quality of Carpenter’s film, exemplified by Jamie Lee Curtis struggling to survive the normally festive Halloween night, and Donald Pleasence earnestly warning of the bogeyman, sustained the tension and suspense of Michael’s return to Haddonfield. Zombie erases this adversarial plotline by perfunctorily moving from sex-romping victim to sex-romping victim in well-orchestrated, but uninvolving mayhem as Michael goes after his now grown up baby sister. There is no anticipation of violence here, and therefore no suspense or real scares from the unexpected. Michael kills anything in sight so knowing what he’s going to do next is a no-brainer. He’s going to kill everyone in sight. Ho-hum.

    Malcolm McDowell’s Dr. Loomis is more social worker than psychiatrist, and doesn’t have the vulnerability that made Donald Pleasence’s more fearful Loomis more interesting. When McDowell tells Michael—after the body count has been steadily rising—that “I’ve failed you,” I thought to myself “Ya think?” Zombie’s Dr. Loomis laments why Michael is so screwed up he can’t be helped; Carpenter’s Dr. Loomis realizes Michael is just plain evil, he’s dangerous, and needs to be locked away forever. Which one do you think would sustain more tension in the storyline?

    The trend toward making serial killers humongous in stature also works against subtlety here. Tyler Mane’s Michael Myers is visually imposing, but evil is most devilish when it comes in  average height. And how the hell did little Mikey grow so big anyway? Mask-making is hardly a resistance-exercise, and that’s all he did in his little cell; make paper-maché masks of all kinds to hide his face.

    Zombie does toss in a few nods to the original film, and makes good use of the original soundtrack. There’s also a nod to his former band, White Zombie, as  Murder Legendre briefly pops up on a television screen. Zombie continues this theme as classic horror movies appear on television screens here and there. Numerous cameos include Micky Dolenz and Sid Haig.

    Zombie knows his craft, but relies on trash-violence and unsavory characters to tell his story every time, demeaning the level of
    artistry Carpenter showed in the original. Giving Michael Myers a sordid background, filled with animal cruelty and vicious murder, removes the mystery behind the mask, making this just another slasher film whose action  could have taken place at any time during the
    year. But this movie’s monster is supposed to be the Halloween bogeyman, damn it.

    Re-imaginings like these make us realize what makes a classic so classic. That, at least, is a good thing.

    Carved (2007)
    Scissors Are For Cutting

    / Movies (Slasher) / Leave a Comment

    Hanako-san and the Toilet

    Hanako-san’s ghost haunts the restrooms of many schools in Japan. She appears if her name is called, but you really don’t want to do that; especially on a dare, late at night, when her darker, revenge-filled spirit is at full strength. She died from a broken heart, from constant bullying by her peers, and waits patiently for the time when her tormentors will have to go. School children in Japan were so frightened by this urban legend, many could not go alone to the toilet; where Hanako-san patiently waits. It is said that if you listen closely, you can hear her whispered curses echoing softly off the tiles…

    Zombos Says: Good

    Japanese urban legends are engrossing, aren’t they? While similar in many respects to American ones, they tease reason loose from the mundane, and play on our fears of unrelenting  supernatural evil and contagion, spiraling out of control in a way that uniquely plays off the community and tradition-based culture of Japan. In America, the witch, Bloody Mary, simply rips your face off if you’re suckered into saying her name thirteen times out loud, while looking in a candle-lit mirror in the dead of night. In Japan, she’d be the ghost of some mistreated woman who rips your face off, then pops up unexpectedly to rip all of your friends’ faces off, then possesses someone close, just when you think it’s over, to continue ripping faces off anyone coming into contact with you.

    And she would most likely hold a large pair of blood-dripping scissors to squeeze every last drop of terror out of you as she silently floats across the floor in a greenish haze, anxious to snip snip snip your flesh.

    Director and co-writer Kôji Shiraishi’s, A Slit-Mouthed Woman (released as Carved in the USA by Tartan Video), uses the Kuchisake-onna urban legend as its source. In Japanese mythology, Kuchisake-onna is the evil spirit of a woman mutilated by her samurai husband, who cuts her mouth open from ear to ear as retribution for her infidelity, or pride, depending on which version of the legend you prefer.

    In Carved, Kuchisake-onna is transformed into the evil spirit of a sickly mother who physically abused and killed her children. Her obake returns to prey on the frightened children in the small town of Midoriyama, wielding a rusty pair of bloody scissors and wearing a white hospital mask and trench-coat. The white mask, a common sight in Japan, covers the gash that runs from ear to ear, a nod to the original legend, but not quite explained here. The traditional “Am I pretty?” question, which presages violent death for her victims, is also out of place. Instead, Shiraishi and co-writer, Naoyuki Yokota, while keeping the well-known aspects of the legend, alter it by adding abusive mothers as the underlying instigation and perpetuation of the horror that steals children away late in the afternoon to murder and mutilate them.

    Many Asian horror films center on an unrelenting evil force that grows from the murder of an innocent person. While vengeance is often the catalyst, that force soon envelops or contaminates anyone in close proximity, whether good or bad, as it spreads outward. In Carved, the evil grows from a person who’s bad to begin with—a refreshing change from the usual Japanese approach, though it’s a typical American Horror staple: we like our monsters monstrous from the start you know, and our victims less than pure so they sort of deserve what they get.

    The unsavory story begins with three kids talking about the slit-mouthed woman as they walk home after class. Indeed, I wish I had a quarter for every time “slit-mouthed woman” was said by someone in the film. Half-way through I stopped counting. An earthquake shakes the town, and releases the spirit of Kuchisake-onna. Before you could gasp “slit-mouthed woman!” she snatches away kid number one. The next day, Mika, the abused-at-home and bullied-at-school kid thinks she’s next. Depressed kids often think like that, even in Japan.

    Ms. Yamashita, her teacher, walks the students home, and when it comes time to drop Mika off, they start talking. Mika shows the bruises her mom left on her arms, but Yamashita, a reformed abuser herself, yells at Mika for wishing ill on her mom. As Mika runs away—that’s right—she’s nabbed by the slit-mouthed woman while Yamashita cowers in fear.

    Maybe they should have sent Mr. Matsuzaki to take the kids home instead. Strangely, he’s not really scared of the slit-mouthed woman (have you started counting how may times I’ve written “slit-mouthed woman” yet?). But he does keep hearing her voice in his mind, just before she grabs a kid and disappears. The police, not believing Yamashita’s supernatural depiction of the kidnapping, think it’s someone dressed up as—oh, you know who—so Yamashita and Matsuzaki team up to search for the missing children. When he hears “Am I pretty” again, they jump into his car and race to the home of the slit-mouthed woman’s next victim. They show up in the nick of time to watch the slit-mouthed woman grab the poor kid from behind. When she whips out her scissors to do a little trimming on his mouth, Matsuzaki plays WWE SmackDown with her while Yamashita cowers again. Surprisingly, he plunges the scissors into the slit-mouthed woman instead and “kills” her. But not for long.

    Up to this point, the pacing is slow and remains that way. Tension doesn’t build in this film, and the emotional setpoints that should kick our feelings into gear around certain scenes don’t budge one iota. Yet, the storyline remains strangely involving, and a few scenes, while lacking emotional charge from the missing tension-building, will still make you squirm in discomfort.

    I squirmed when three bound children are brutalized, leaving one stabbed to death, another horribly mutilated and scarred for life, in both body and soul, and the third having to witness it and wonder when she’s next. While the atrocities are mostly implied, the impression is still harrowing. We don’t often see children harmed in horror films, and I hope this doesn’t mark a trend in that direction. But within this film, it stands out as truly shocking and horrible, and fits into the context of the story.

    The inevitable showdown takes place on Childbeck Hill, at the deserted home of Mr. Matsuzaki. It appears he left one particular skeleton in his closet, and those bones are still rattling rather loudly. A flashback gives us his story and why he may be the only one who can stop the slit-mouthed woman. In a totally American-styled ending, the evil continues to play rock, paper, scissors-in-your-mouth for the potential sequel. While I’ve often quipped “would you like fries with that” in regard to American Horror, I never thought I’d be saying it when discussing J-Horror. Times change, I suppose, and the franchising sequelization-antics so prevalent in America’s horror industry appear to have spread their evil contagion, too.

    The image of the slit-mouthed woman is nicely stylized for marketability also. I can see those McFarlane toys now. Horrorheads will love them; especially the realistic removable hospital mask, real fabric trench-coat, and realistic-action scissors. Now if they can toss in a voice-chip that says “Am I pretty?” “Smile!” and “Kiss my ass, Freddy” that would be perfect. Add a few mutilated children cowering in fear and you’d have an awesome playset.

    Phantasm (1979)
    Beware the Tall Man

    / Movies (Horror) / 2 Comments

    Zombos Says: Very Good

    Welcome to your nightmare, Mike.

    Your parents are dead and your brother Jody is thinking of dumping you off to your aunt while he hits the road in his Plymouth Barracuda muscle car. I’d be depressed, too. It’s no wonder your imagination starts running wild. I’d start imagining all sorts of phantasms if loss and abandonment were uppermost in my mind.

    Being a kid in the 1970s doesn’t help much, either. After that exuberant, but now defunct, 1960s high, Tom Wolfe’s aptly named “Me
    Decade,” is spinning out of control like a bad, long, hallucinatory trip that begins with a glittering disco ball and quickly morphs into one of the Tall Man’s sentinel spheres sticking out of your forehead, drilling into your brain.

    Phantasm is Don Coscarelli’s acid trip on the dark side. With many social institutions losing their veneer of propriety in the 70s, Coscarelli made sure to beat up our quaint notions of peaceful death, comforting undertakers, and simple horror movies. His low-budget film, initially financed by his dad and picked up by Universal after a rough-cut showing, is a tad dated in the special effects department, but
    remains a scary, bizarre, trip centering around Morningside Mortuary with Mini-Me versions of recently deceased people popping up, flying metal balls with nasty skull-drills popping up, and a tall sneering gentleman from another place far far away popping up. Able to lift long coffins with a single arm, and endowed with abilities far beyond those of mere mortals like Jody, Mike, and Reggie—the guitar-playing ice-cream man—the Tall Man is one cantankerous and dangerous undertaker.

    So go ahead, toss an ABBA platter onto the old turn-table and crank up the volume if that will help make you feel better for a little while. It’s time to have that safe, comfy, feeling blown out from under you, when even in death you get no respect.

    Can you dig it?

    It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes Phantasm a cult classic. While the direction is a bit rough, there’s a distinct momentum in
    scenes, like a deck of cards being neatly shuffled with each card crisply riffling into the interweaving pile. While the acting is also a bit amateurish, there’s a disarming simplicity to each of the characters, making their nightmarish ordeal stand out against the ordinariness of their lives. While some of the effects are low-tech, they play on the absurd terror of the situation, and the eerie, almost dreamlike—or nightmare-like—situations that reveal more of the sardonic Tall Man’s alien nature, and his sacrilegious dwarfing-down of the bodies of loved ones supposed to be at rest.

    The film opens with a glimpse of sex and murder precipitated by the Tall Man’s more feminine side. In a weird twist that disorients with its shock-blink between her and him, we’re hustled into a funeral that brings together best-buds even though the unexpected death of their buddy, Tommy, breaks up their musical trio for good. Now with little left to hold him down, Jody is ready to leave the small town, but Mike, his younger brother, doesn’t want to lose the only close family he has left. But Mike has little time to be depressed; the mortuary’s undertaker is a queer sort, and Mike starts to suspect why.

    Or is Mike just punch-drunk from grief and imagining things?

    Not knowing which end is up, Mike heads to his local psychic for help. She plays the old stick-your-hand-in-the-box trick and tells him to
    control his fear. But fear from what? Leaving the psychic, he’s more confused than when he went in, so he stays close to his big brother. Trolling the local bar, Jody picks up the same “woman” who iced his bud, Tommy. Lucky for him, Mike interrupts his brother’s nocturnal romp in the cemetery before she can do any harm.

    The next day, while following Jody around again, Mike sees the Tall Man walking across the street. A blast of cold air from an ice-cream truck attracts the Tall Man’s attention. Angus Scrimm is surreal as the lean, mean, undertaker-machine. His voice, his face, his whole body makes you want to run the other way when he approaches. Like the alien harvester in 1957’s Not of This Earth, the Tall Man is up to no good, and Mike aims to find out just what that is.

    Taking a sharp knife with him, Mike heads to Morningside Mortuary.

    Late at night, of course. A quick kick through the basement window later, he’s prowling around the creepy marble hallways. In no time at all, he’s barely escaping encounters with an oversized ball-bearing from hell and the Tall Man and his Jawa-looking munchkins. After slamming a big metal door shut before he’s caught, he’s startled to find the Tall Man’s hand, flattened, still moving, and sticking out of the tiny crack in the door frame. He lops off a few of its fingers, spilling yellow ichor from the stumps. Mike realizes it’s time to high-tail it
    out of there. Before he goes, he grabs one of the fingers as evidence.

    More nightmarish events ensue after underage Mike downs a beer or two and convinces Jody not all is right with Morningside Mortuary. Jody loads up the old family gun and heads there—again at night—but gets attacked by a dwarf and makes a run for it. Worse yet, a hearse chases after him, driven by a much shorter—didn’t we just bury him?—Tommy. Underage Mike pulls up in the bitchin’ Barracuda, and the race is on. Reggie pulls up in his ice-cream truck after the hearse crashes and they discover the diminutive Tommy at the wheel.

    Jody sends Mike to Sally’s antique store for safety while they stuff the little guy into Reggie’s truck so the squirt can ooze yellow ichor
    over all the popsicles. While perusing the antiques back at Sally’s, Mike’s eyes pop out when he comes across an old tintype photo of the Tall Man that comes alive (Stephen King uses the same effect in his novel, IT).

    Looks like the guy’s been around for a long, long time. Great. Time to rethink their fighting strategy.

    Reggie, the ice-cream packing, guitar-strumming dude, joins in the fight. Being an ice-cream packing, guitar-strumming dude, he gets whooped good when Tommy bounces back to angry life among the popsicles. When the three of them—Mike, Jody, and Reggie—regroup and converge on the mortuary, they find the gateway to another world, lots more angry munchkins ready for UPS Global pickup, and all about what the Tall Man’s been up to. Just when you think the story is nice-and-tidily ended, Coscarelli throws in a curve-ball. With three
    sequels, the Tall Man is unstoppable.

    Phantasm will leave you wanting more flying balls of death, more of the Tall Man’s shenanigans, and more munchkin-madness.

    The Gravedancers (2006)

    / Movies (Ghostly) / Leave a Comment

    The Gravedancers 2006 movie posterZombos Says: Good

     

    Step on a crack, break your back.
    Step under a ladder, fall with a clatter.
    Dance on a grave, get your ass kicked.

    Zombos and I were out in the family cemetery, in the tepid air of a late summer night, prowling around for blurry apparitions to capture on video and unintelligible but spooky noises to record on our digital recorders. He was so excited after watching the new episodes of Ghost Hunters and the Haunted Collector on the Syfy Channel he went online and bought a bunch of spirit-busting gizmos.

    “I think I have Uncle Clarence on the thermal imaging scope,” he said with glee. He pointed to a pink blob in the lower left corner. It was bent over at an odd angle; Uncle Clarence was always bent over from the weight of his hunchback.

    “That’s your thumb,” I finally said. He grunted his disappointment and moved his thumb out of the way.

    “Hullo, what’s that?” I pointed to a dark shape floating just above Cousin Shoemaker’s tombstone. The Ghost-Mart Smart-Budget EMF reader’s numbers were jumping into the high digits.

    We cautiously approached the globular shape that quietly hovered above the grave.

    “Quick, ask some questions so we can capture its voice on the digital recorder,” Zombos directed.

    “Are you Cousin Titus Shoemaker? If so, where did you bury your fortune in the mansion? And how much is it worth? And is it true that Aunt Matilda hit you in the head forty-one times with that meat cleaver Chef Machiavelli still insists on keeping in the third drawer to the right of the triple sink just because you snored?”

    “Oh, bugger!” Zombos had gotten close enough to touch the floating shape. “It is not ectoplasm. It is a Barney helium balloon.”

    “Damn.” I turned off the digital recorder. “Well, perhaps we should just watch The Gravedancers instead?”

    “Capital idea!” someone said.

    Zombos looked at me. I looked at him. We looked around the empty cemetery. We kept looking back at it as we ran to the safety of the mansion.

     

    While the smartly dressed paranormal investigators in The Gravedancers aren’t exactly the plumbers by day, fearless supernatural inquirers by night kind, they still manage to do a few things right. But in the end, when you go dancing on other people’s graves, you might as well stick a “Kick Me” sign on your back and be done with it.

    The nearer to death among you may remember the 1942 Lights Out radio drama, Poltergeist, about the terminal effects from gravedancing. Building on this premise, Mike Mendez’ movie is a tidy little romp in the spirit world that draws inspiration and visual styling from such gems as Night of the Demons, The Frighteners, and Poltergeist.

    Unfortunately, it also draws a bit too much from the over the top remake of The Haunting, and that’s where it loses the scary-cred it builds up in the first two-thirds of the story. For a low-budget fright-flick, however, it’s stylish, has good acting, and has coherent—if not always best for the situation—dialog. Toss in its few good shocks and you’ve got a good ghost flick to add to your Halloween viewing list.

    Three long-time, but haven’t-seen-each-other-in-a-while friends get together for another friend’s funeral. Oddly enough, the funeral
    has nothing to do with the now obligatory horror movie shock opening in the first few minutes. It’s thrilling and chilling, but don’t expect it to tie in anytime soon with the rest of the story. At the goading of the friend who’s yearbook photo has noted “voted the most likely to succeed at Kinkos,” they wind up back at the grave in Crescent View Cemetery, late at night, and stone-cold drunk.

    Oh look! Someone’s left an odd card at their friend’s tombstone.

    It reads to party all night, and dance over as many graves as possible to loud rock music.

    Sure, why not?

    Their luck goes downhill from here. The camera nervously peeks around at the shocked tombstones as our bunch, led by that Kinkos ne’er-do-idiot, dance on the resting spots of the town’s worst former inhabitants: an incendiary child guilty of multiple homicides; a pillar of the community who tortured many women tied to it; and a piano teacher who chopped up her lover when not playing Chopin; making that a neat one ghost each for them and their death-mocking dance.

    In the weeks that follow, creepy sounds, flickering lights, doors opening on their own, a frightened cat, and a piano playing by itself spook Harris McKay (Dominic Purcell) and his significantly-spooked other, Allison (Clare Kramer). They follow up with Kira, another gravely afflicted cemetery party-goer, who has been having her own ups and downs with a spirit that alternately bites and molests her. They bring her to a hospital; a setup for a wonderfully frightening encounter with a spirited gurney.

    Their third dance partner, that Kinkos guy who got them in this mess, has been having some hot issues of his own. When they go to visit him, he’s already called in the local college’s paranormal investigation team (all the rage now, really) headed by Vincent (Tcheky Karyo), and his comely assistant, Culpepper (Meghann Perry). It takes the investigators little time to figure out it’s the old dancing-on-graves curse at work, which persists from moon to moon, or until the cursed person dies. I bet Jason and Grant from TAPS never heard of that one.

    So it’s back to Crescent View Cemetery, in the dead of night (of course), to rebury the remains of the antagonized ghosts in hopes of putting them to rest—again. What ensues is a nicely choreographed example of why you shouldn’t jump into graves with very spiteful ghosts itching to bury you, too. It gets worse when one of the investigators decides to do something very unprofessional, leading to more animatronic special effects, surprisingly well done on such a small budget, but somewhat over the top for what started as a more intimate haunting.

    Everyone  regroups at the investigators’ stately mansion (Jason and Grant, eat your heart out), but soon they’re bickering over who slept with whom and arguing over old relationship issues. You know, the sorts of things every potential victim in a horror movie does just before he or she dies. An unexpected rearrangement of the landscape keeps them locked in the mansion, trying to fend off their three ghostly antagonists who keep coming on strong.

    The climax is a heady mix of really big, ghostly CGI animation, a determined floating bloody corpse wielding a very sharp axe, and a skillful product placement for HUMMER—I’d like to see a Prius save the day like that.

    After this movie, I guarantee you’ll not dance on any graves any time soon, and you’ll pay more attention to Jason and Grant on Ghost Hunters, looking for as many useful pointers as possible to ward off vengeful spirits.

    You never know.

    Ray Harryhausen Presents
    The Pit and the Pendulum (2006)

    / Art/Animation / Leave a Comment

    I was sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.

    –Edgar Allen Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum

    Zombos Says: Very Good

    Having grown up on TV shows like Davey and Goliath and Gumby, stop motion animation is an enjoyable form of storytelling for me. From the simplicity and witty fun of Gumby, to the richness of design found in The Nightmare Before Christmas, the stories are often magical and the characters always imaginative. Stop motion techniques can be used with clay, puppets, and realistic-looking articulated models like Willis O’Brien’s emotive King Kong or Ray Harryhausen’s creepy fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts.

    Stop motion has been skillfully and shoddily used with many traditional and avant-garde horror and science-fiction films since around 1908, and lends itself to the short subject rather well, especially when the setting is simple, and the actions straightforward. Marc Lougee’s stop motion adaptation of Poe’s, The Pit and the Pendulum, is a good example of this. Poe’s story is a straightforward narrative of despair, desperation, and horror. The anonymity of the villains, the delirium of the victim, and the increasingly horrific situations he confronts is ripe for a short film that captures this singular time frame of struggle against increasingly dire odds.

    While Poe’s story is required reading for many college kids, this visualization of the torments suffered by the unnamed prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition would be a welcome addition to the curriculum. While a bit of license is used for dramatic visual effect (the prisoner doesn’t have a metal helmet locked around his head in the original story), the short seven-minute film adheres to and captures the essence of terror with vivid detail in its CG-enhanced miniature sets and stylized puppets.

    Pit02_2 There’s an exaggerated character-movement inherent to stop-motion. It can either breathe dramatic life into the actions of its diminutive characters, or create a cartoonish-effect that hinders more serious storylines. Poe is deadly serious here, and animators Weiss and Fairley create movement that conveys much of the drama and tension without whimsical or absurd motions. The robed tribunal members, murmuring and motioning with their heads and hands in a condemning way, and the prisoner’s halting steps, exhausted posture, and fearful exploration of the dungeon, visually portray the literary tone of the short story with their painstaking and time-consuming attention to detail.

    Dwayne Hill narrates the inner thoughts and feelings of the confused and fearful prisoner, condemned to the dark dungeons, without maudlin overtones. His voice is of a rational man in irrational circumstances; a man trying to reason through his predicament in hopes of finding an escape from his tormentors, and their fiendish instruments of torture and death.

    One ray of hope and beauty written into the film, and not in Poe’s gloomy tale, is the entrance of a brightly-colored bird fluttering around the solitary window of the cell, high up out of reach. The cheerful scene contrasts with the somber browns and blacks of the walls and floor. It is a nice foreshadowing of hope as the prisoner looks up toward the feeble light, entering through the bars, illuminating the red feathers of the bird flying about carefree. It fortifies the visual storytelling in a simple but majestic manner.

    Though not based on historical accuracy, the fictional pit and pendulum of the story heighten the fearsome depravity and inhumanity of the prisoner’s death sentence. In true horror story fashion, death is not the worst part, but getting there is. While reason keeps the prisoner from Pit13 succumbing to the razor sharp blade of the pendulum, it can’t stop the heated iron walls of his cell from forcing him ever closer to that infernal pit in the middle of the room. What horrors await should he fall down into the deep darkness?

    It’s hard to capture Poe’s narrative detail, the rush of terror-filled thoughts overwhelming the long-suffering prisoner in his final moments before succumbing to the foul-smelling pit, especially in a six-to-seven minute film. But the climax here, with its carefully framed arm darting down to rescue him as he descends into oblivion, pulling him back to sanity and safety, is thrillingly done.

    The Pit and the Pendulum’s stop motion artistry proves old techniques, when combined with creativity and a touch of new technology, still have much to offer.

    Night Monster (1942)

    / Universal Monsters / 2 Comments

    Night monster
    Zombos Says: Very Good

    “Do you hear that?” asked Zombos.

    “Hear what? It’s quiet,” I said, puzzled by his question.

    “That is my point: the quiet. The cicadas have gone quiet.” He looked over his shoulder.

    “By George, you’re right. I wonder what…” I looked over my shoulder, though I wasn’t sure why.

    We had been walking the beach close to the mansion, enjoying the West Egg summer night’s mix of sticky humidity and soft breeze coming off the water. With the sudden quiet, we had stopped and were now intently looking at the dense woods a few feet away on our left.

    “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I reassured him. “Come to think of it, it reminds me of that movie…let me think…the one with that swami guy, Bela, and those croaking frogs that stop croaking in the middle of the night just before a murder happens.”

    “Oh, you mean Night Monster,” said Zombos, not taking his eyes off the woods.

    “That’s it!” I said, not taking my eyes off the woods, either. “You know, we should retreat to the cinematorium for a showing.” Zombos agreed wholeheartedly and we dashed back to the mansion, looking behind us every so often as we ran. Though I’m not sure why.

     

    An old dark mansion, blood stains that keep appearing in the carpeting, and thick fog swirling off the slough; if that’s not creepy enough for you, Night Monster, an unusual Universal B-horror movie energetically directed by Ford Beebe, also has Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, and some thing—scaring the croaking frogs into silence—going around killing people inside the brooding Ingston Towers mansion and outside it.

    Of the many B-movies that Universal churned out in the 1940s, Night Monster stands out as a tidy little exercise in country-gothic horror, and, while not truly a mystery, although it plays like one, it retains an eerie atmosphere with its fast-paced tale of grotesque preternatural goings-on, Hindu mysticism, and familial madness at the Ingston Estate nestled deep in the southern woods.

    Curiously enough, while Lugosi and Atwill are given top billing in the opening credits, both have only supporting roles: Lugosi plays the persnickety butler, Rolf, and Atwill is Dr. King, whose mortal coil is shuffled off rather early in the movie. They make the best of their limited time onscreen with enough preening and posturing between them to satisfy any fan of the classic horror genre. Perhaps Lugosi was supposed to be the plot’s red herring, but if so, that aspect of his role got lost in the translation from script to screen.

    Evil things are afoot at the old Ingston homestead. One look at Torque (Cyril Delevanti), the sour, hunched-over gatekeeper, and Sarah (Doris Lloyd), the starch-collared and tight-lipped housekeeper, is enough to see the household is not doing all that well. Margaret Ingston (Fay Helm) worries she’s got hereditary bats in her belfry, so she invites psychiatrist Dr. Harper (Irene Hervey) to visit and bring a cup of sanity. Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan), her crippled brother, stews in his own juices, cynical of the modern medicine that failed him, and hating the three doctors responsible for his disfigurement. Yet he invites them to a little-dinner-and-a-lot-of-vitriol weekend to see a demonstration of something beyond their science, beyond the natural laws of nature, courtesy of his very own yogi master, Agor Singh (Nils Asther).

    Surprisingly, the important Hindu mystic role is not played by Lugosi, who did wear a turban as Chandu the Magician in The Return of Chandu, and as psychic, Tarneverro, in The Black Camel. Instead, Asther, an actor born in Denmark, provides the foreign accent and dark features this time around, perhaps necessarily less than Lugosi would have mustered given his iconic gravitas.

    It’s when Agor Singh does his after-dinner demonstration for the guests, calling forth a skeleton from an ancient tomb far away to appear out of thin air, with blood dripping from its outstretched bony fingers, that the story takes a welcomed spooky detour from the usually more straightforward B-movie fare. Singh has been teaching Kurt Ingston the ancient art of cosmic substance control. With his mind properly trained, Ingston can replace his amputated legs with new ones created by his mind, enabling him to walk again; or instead, he could kill those incompetent medical bastards one by one with his new, cosmic stuff-filled limbs.

    I wonder which way he’ll go? A puddle of blood is found where the skeleton appeared; an odd byproduct of the arcane mind control, comments Singh. A quirky little toss away detail that adds a touch more to the weirdness.

    Jack Otterson’s (The Mummy’s Tomb) art direction and Charles Van Enger’s camera build a gothic atmosphere and slick gloss for Beebe’s movie. Enhanced by moody, terror-tense music, some of it previously heard in The Wolf Man, the secluded mansion’s menacing shadows, secret passageways, and flickering, fireplace-lighted gloom, all surrounded by a miasma of swirling fog, show a hypnotic palette of images. Window-frame shadows play across daytime interiors, and ominous shadows cast by furniture give a noir-ish textural depth to ordinary scenes, showing unexpected creativity and artistic preference in this budget production. The sudden quiet of the boisterously croaking frogs, followed by the screech of a door opening in the garden, signals the approach of the monster, a clever gimmick to heighten the suspense. In the 2007 movie Dead Silence a similar technique is used to equal effect.

    The air of dread and impending doom is sustained by the mansion’s characters and their questionable intentions: Laurie (Leif Erickson) the chauffeur has nothing but dames and hanky-panky on his mind, but it’s not clear what else he’s involved in. Rolf acts sinister and supercilious until the bodies start showing up, and Sarah secretly has the hots for Kurt Ingston and looks guilty just standing around.

    Providing comic relief are Constable Beggs (Robert Homans), who investigates when Millie (Janet Shaw) the maid is found strangled next to a puddle of blood, and Dr. Phipps (Francis Pierlot), the diminutive physician with a penchant for gland research. The more serious romantic roles are handled by Dick Baldwin (Don Porter), a mystery writer invited to the little gathering by Kurt Ingston (okay, why invite a mystery writer?), and Dr. Harper, who’s trying to get to the bottom of Margaret’s fears.

    The weird murders happen fast and furious. While Dr. King is strangled off-camera, the discovery of his body is shown through the reactions of others, followed by a close-up of his lifeless clenched hand.  Dr. Timmons is surprised in his room next as a silhouetted figure steps out of his closet, its shadow growing larger on the wall as it lunges toward him. A close-up of his lifeless hand is shown. Then timid Dr. Phipps is attacked when he opens his bedroom door, thinking it is Laurie come to take him away from the mansion. We see him through the killer’s eyes as he recoils in fear, unable to scream as death approaches.

    In the climax, Dr. Harper and Baldwin make a dash for it as the frogs stop croaking and the garden door creaks open, while Margaret decides to throw a hissy-fit with Sarah and play with fire. Will the killer be revealed? Will Dr. Harper ever get her blasted foot unstuck from the rotted foot bridge that Dick insisted on fleeing across? Will we ever find out why the, up-till-now, very reserved and strong-willed psychiatrist starts screaming like a B-movie girl instead of concentrating on getting her foot unstuck before Dick gets his ticket punched by the monster?

    I’m sure you’ll enjoy finding out.

    Special thanks to HHWolfman at the Universal Monster Army. While at the 2007 Monster Bash, I mentioned I wanted to review this neglected film. He soon surprised me with a copy of it, hot off the back of a hearse. Thanks HH. Thanks also to Richard Scrivani, who screened it at the Monster Bash, rekindling my interest in it.